Daily Archives: Friday, 110610

i had the opportunity to wander for several hours down by the puyallup river this afternoon, and i made one of those kind of discoveries that you would expect from time to time, from enlightened people. like most discoveries, it wasn’t really a discovery so much as it was putting familiar things together in a way that makes ultimate sense — and it produced a feeling that i probably should have thought of it a lot earlier than i did, because one of the “familiar things” that was put together was the phrase “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability”.

this phrase probably has a very specific meaning to physical scientists, and it is from that, that i have taken the phrase and “expanded” on it. fundamentally, “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” refers to the way atoms combine and interact with one another, in very much the same way as water going over a waterfall: “Bounded Chaotic Mixing” is the water, in a riverbed; it is “bounded” by the riverbed, but the individual water molecules have the freedom to move wherever they want, within those boundaries. when it goes over a waterfall, the “mixing” gets decidedly more “chaotic”. “Strange Stability”, once the water has gone over the waterfall, it is “stable” in that most of it falls more or less in the same place, most of the time, but it is “strange” because, occasionally, some of the water falls in a place that is dramatically different from the majority of the water: you can be standing right next to a waterfall, and not get wet most of the time… but occasionally, and you can’t predict precisely when, you will get wet.

this is a phenomenon that i have known about for most of my life, i learned that the phenomenon could be summarised by the phrase “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” about 20 years ago, and for the past 10 years or so, i have been noticing that “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” can be used to describe a lot of things that happen in life, but while i was watching the river ripple, this afternoon, i realised that “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” is what people are talking about when they talk about “The Meaning Of Life” — “Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” is THE reason, whether you’re talking about why your car broke down today, or why you and your next-door neighbour don’t get along, or whether you’re talking about the evolution of human beings from single-celled life.

“Bounded Chaotic Mixing Produces Strange Stability” is, for all intents and purposes, “God”… and this is coming from an enlightened person, so it carries more weight than it would otherwise.